Tod: On the road from Toronto, Canada, this is the How to do Stuff Podcast. I'm Tod Maffin. Today is December 14th, I think, or, something like that. Anyway, thanks for staying subscribed. I know it's been a little while since I've put one of these out, but I think this one is worth the wait. Especially if you are a podcaster or are interested in radio -- expert tips on how to interview someone from someone who makes his living and, in fact, has built his career around talking to people and interviewing people. I think you'll enjoy it. First, very briefly, though, I'm in Toronto this week for the CBC Podcasting Sessions. We are trying to figure out what we want to do for podcasting and how we can serve you better as far as bringing you CBC Radio content on your iPod or digital music player of your choice.
And if you are in Canada, we want to hear from you. We've just put up a survey at CBC.ca/podcasting. Please do answer it. It takes a little while, but it's important and, come early in the New Year, we will be rolling out some podcasts, depending on what you say you want, so easy peasy, as they say. Michael Enright has been the host of CBC Radio One's The Sunday Edition since September of 2000. His journalist credits are impression. Before joining The Sunday Edition, he hosted This Morning for three years; spent 10 years hosting CBC Radio's As It Happens. He's written for Time Magazine and was the editor of Quest. In fact, he was telling me before we started rolling that one of the columns he started in Quest Magazine was called ‘How to do Stuff' or ‘How to do Things'. It was how to start a jet engine; how to do all sorts of strange things, so there's a similarity there. He joined As It Happens after two and a half years as managing editor of CBC Radio News. He's done all sorts of stuff; written for The Toronto Star and so forth. So he is certainly an expert; one of Canada's preeminent interviewers, broadcasters and thinkers. I sat down with him earlier today and asked him, what's the biggest mistake that people make when they interview someone? Michael: Well, it's a cliché, but the most important thing is to listen and people don't listen. The interviewers don't listen. We never seem to learn how to ask the supplementary question. For example, I've always found that the answer to a question is found in the answer to question A. In other words, the next question is contained in the previous answer, I find. Tod: When you're interviewing someone, are you focused more on listening to what they're saying or on thinking about what question B will be? Michael: No, I listen. I listen. I'm a good listener. I listen exactly and then it comes. You have to listen creatively. You have to listen with an idea that you understand where you want to go and where you want to take the conversation.
The person you're interviewing, the celebrity or the writer or whoever, wants it to go one way and you want it to go your way. So it's like two people in a canoe kind of paddling in opposite directions and you want to make sure that you're the one with the biggest paddle because you want it to go your way. So, I find that if I listen carefully to what the person's saying then I can formulate the next question and the direction of the thing. Tod: Are you ever worried that you'll dry up? That they'll stop talking and you'll be oh, my God, I have no idea what to ask you? Michael: It's never happened to me, where I've dried up, except one occasion when we were doing As It Happens, many years ago. Archbishop Makarios, the President of Cyprus, died during our show, actually. Very inconsiderate of him and we got somebody in Cyprus to talk about the Archbishop.
I kept looking in the control room and they kept telling me to stretch out the interview; to take it to the top of the clock. I found that I was running out of things to ask the guy and finally I heard myself saying, well, tell me, the Archbishop, was he a religious man?
Tod: Oh, no!
Michael: I thought, that's really the dumbest question I've ever asked. Tod: How did they reply?
Michael: There was long silence. They said well, yes, he was the Archbishop you know.
The other mistake people make is that they go into an interview with somebody and they don't know enough about the person. I spend a lot of time reading the biographies of people to find out who they are and what they've done. And if they've written anything, I like to read what they've written. Tod: But that's a lot of work if you're interviewing a lot of people. Michael: Yeah, it is, but you have to do it because you're there as the surrogate for the listener. If the listener was behind the microphone they would ask certain questions and you're there in their behalf and they're paying the salary and they own the microphone, so you have to do it. You have to do it. That's the job. Tod: Yeah.
Do you ever worry that you go in too prepared, though? I mean, you read so much that maybe you're so well-briefed on them there's no element of surprise? Michael: It's not the element of surprise it's the spontaneity. You want to be spontaneous. You want to always leave that open. You want to be spontaneous. No. I find that it doesn't matter how much you know, you can't know everything and people will always tell you something you haven't read or you didn't know about or you hadn't heard. I interviewed a man one time who was in the Northwest Territories and the point of it was that he was Santa Claus to all the kids. The wrinkle was that he traveled by every known method of transportation -- dog team, helicopter, skidoo; all of these things -- and went to all of these little villages with the kids.
It was a very nice little interview and I knew, mostly, where I was going with it and I said, finally, tell me, do you think the kids recognize you when you're not being Santa Claus? Like they see you on the street, do they recognize you? He said oh, yeah, I think they recognize me. I said well, how's that? He said well, I have six fingers on my left hand. And that stopped me.
Tod: Yeah.
Michael: There was no way I could know that. And that was spontaneous.
Tod: There was no briefing note for you on his fingers?
Michael: No. No, no, no and it was wonderful. It was just a great moment. I guess you could be over prepared, but that's not happened to me. Tod: What about, to kind of flip it on the other side, if someone wanted to be a really good interviewee or a really good guest, are there a couple of pointers that in a dream world if you could give every one who comes on your show the following two pointers and they must abide by them?
Michael: Yes, one is always call the interviewer by his or her first name: Well, thanks, Tod, I'm glad you asked that question. That creates a phony intimacy, right? That we're buddies. Tod: And is that good?
Michael: Well, that's good for the interviewee. Sure, because then he flatters the host, especially politicians who do this all the time: Well, thank you, Peter, that's a very good question. Tod: Right.
Michael: Then they feel oh, he liked my question. Woo, isn't that nice. I guess we must be buddies.
The other thing I would say to an interviewee, potential or otherwise, is to don't answer the question you're asked; answer the question you would like to have been asked. Tod: Oh. Because you hear politicians do this all the time and sometimes it's so wildly different than the question they're asked I wonder how the reporter or interviewer let's them get away with it. Michael: What you do if you're the interviewee, if you're the guest, you say well, that's a very good question, Michael. That's an important question you're asking and I'll get to it in a minute, but I want to tell you that the other thing that we should be looking at…da, da, da. And by the time he or she gets out that political message, you haven't got time to go back to the original question. I interviewed Preston Manning on a number of occasions, early on, when he began the Reform Party thing. I asked him the same question four times, because he didn't answer it. It got to be a little boring after a while, but politicians are very good at that.
Tod: Do you think he recognized he was being asked this question? Was it getting to a point where it was almost comical?
Michael: Yes. Oh, he was getting a little ticked off, actually.
Tod: Really?
Michael: Yeah. There was someone else I interviewed, I've forgotten who it was, but he kept using this phrase over and over and over again: The great Province of Ontario. Something, I can't remember what it was. I said okay, now could you answer the question without using that phrase? He said, what do you mean? I said well, you know.
To be interviewed, it's a game and a science, you know? It's an art. You want to get your message out and the interviewer wants to create a story for the listener, right? Some kind of narrative or something the listener can pick up, so it's a constant tussle. And when it works it works well.
It's important in radio that we leave white space, too, when someone says something. We're terrified of dead air, so we always jump in to fill it. Some of the best interviews I've done, somebody will say something and I'll just leave it; three or four seconds before the next question. Tod: Wow.
See, three or four seconds scares me.
Michael: Long time. Well, maybe three; three seconds or two seconds and just leave it, you know? I like confrontational interviews. I like to do fairly heated interviews, because I think that brings out the people's real message, you know, the real thing. Tod: Do you think interviewing is a lost art?
Michael: I don't know if it was ever an art. I don't think it's lost, no. I think the problem is we rely too much on what we think the listener wants to hear, rather than what we want to hear. What I want to hear is the interviewer. It's a conversation and the listener is eavesdropping. Tod: See, that almost seems contradictory to what you said earlier, which is that we're the advocate for. Michael: We are.
Tod: Yeah.
So how do you balance those two?
Michael: This is perhaps arrogant, but if you are really interested in the subject and you conduct yourself accordingly, the listener will be interested too; the listener will come along. Listeners are very sympathetic to what you're doing or trying to do. I think that if you're engaged and if it's working and cooking it doesn't matter what the subject is, really, the listener will pick up on it. Tod: And I'm surprised to hear you say that that's not an art. Michael: Maybe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe it's creative, I don't know. To me it's just being a reporter, which is what I started out as 100 years ago. It's just asking the questions you want answers to. I'm very curious about things and I want certain answers. I want to know why certain things are the way they are and that's why I interview people. I want to know and the listeners will come along.
Tod: Do you remember the worst interview you've ever conducted? Michael: Oh, God, there's so many. God. Well, one of the worst was someone came in to explain to me how to bake bread and I was bored out of my mind and I let it show.
Tod: Which show was this for?
Michael: This was on This Morning.
Tod: Oh, right.
Michael: But, at the same time, the funniest interview I ever did was on This Morning, which was a three-year disaster that ran on CBC Radio One. It was live and I was to interview these two Tibetan monks who were traveling across the country demonstrating their famous Tibetan throat singing.
Tod: Wow.
Michael: Some chanting, yeah.
Tod: Right.
Michael: And they came in, in the saffron robes, and sat in the studio and the last thing the producer said before the red light went on was they may have a little problem with English.
Tod: Oh, no.
Michael: As a matter of fact, neither of them could speak English.
Tod: Oh, no.
Michael: So I went down the crapper, gallantly, all flags waving.
Tod: How long of an interview was it?
Michael: Well, they put up on the clock 20 minutes. Then I looked at the clock and it was six minutes.
Tod: Right.
Michael: And the studio director was a wonderful, very funny guy named Tom… Tod: …Jokinen. Michael: Tom Jokinen.
Tod: Yeah, I know Tom very well.
Michael: Oh, God. He came on the talkback in my ear and he said, I think the eminence to your left speaks a bit of English. But we had a guy in the control room, a young man who spoke Tibetan.
Tod: No way! Just out of sheer fluke.
Michael: No, he came along with them.
Tod: Oh, I see. Okay, alright.
Michael: On the air, I said perhaps our young friend could come in and help me out with the reverend gentlemen here. The kid came in and he could speak Tibetan, but he was so terrified of being on the radio that he couldn't say anything. The whole thing dissolved me. I broke up.
Tod: Wait a minute, literally? Like burst into laughter?
Michael: Well, one of them started this chant and his face got beet red and his eyes crossed and so I had to turn my chair around and face the wall because I was laughing. I looked in the control room and there was no one there. They were all under the floor.
Tod: They were hiding.
Michael: They were all… We went to a cutaway and the thing was a disaster, but people said it was probably the funniest interview they've ever heard. Tod: I was going to say, it must have been compelling to listen to.
Michael: I think so.
Tod: Yeah.
Michael: I think so, yeah.
Tod: Well, I really appreciate your time. We've been talking for a little over 10 minutes so far. My last question is how do you think I've done as an interviewer? And do not butter me up, give me all the criticism.
Michael: No, very good, because you picked up something I said seven minutes ago. You remembered it and came back at me with it, which doesn't happen very often. You thought that you caught me in a contradiction. Of course, you were absolutely wrong, but that's very good. People don't usually do that. Tod: Alright. Because I'm always worried when I do interviews about the narrative flow; about it having a beginning, a middle and an end. I almost felt like we sort of jumped around.
Michael: Yeah. Well, I don't think we have an ending yet, you see. Tod: No. What would be a good ending for this?
Michael: We're flailing here for an ending. Tod: I mean sort of what's your scariest interview is often a good kicker at the end, but I kind of… Can you sing? Michael: No. I can't sing or I can't draw a straight line either, but I can tell you that the most humiliating thing I ever did was the interview with Mickey Rooney live on radio, in which he went at me with a claw hammer. People still talk about it to this day and I don't want to say anything more about it because it was humiliating. Thank you.
Tod: Michael Enright is the host of The Sunday Edition on CBC Radio One. If you're in Canada you can hear it pretty well anywhere. On Sirius Satellite Radio you can hear it on channel 137 and, of course, it's on CBC.ca. A couple of very quick plugs for you. I've started a new technology blog and it's at TodBits.com. That's t-o-d-b-i-t-s.com, TodBits.com. I hope you have an opportunity to drop by and please do keep the emails coming. I always am grateful to hear from folks, so TodBits.com.
Thanks for listening and there will be new how-to-do-stuff podcasts in the near future. Thanks very much.
